I picked up My Year of Rest and Relaxation based on my admiration for Otessa Moshfegh's writing style and the hilarious cover art. The narrator is a privileged young woman who feels an emptiness in her life. She decides to hibernate for a year in her apartment under the influence of a dangerous combination of drugs, in hopes of emerging as a new person.
Moshfegh very effectively conveys the narrator's emotional attachments, which the narrator denies having. Her relationships with her (dead) parents and her friend Reva are touching even through the haze of her cynicism and depression. The book maintains an ironic "control of distance" between the narrator's point of view and the reader's, similar to what Jane Austen does in Emma (as famously described by the critic Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction).
However, I did sometimes grow tired of the repetitiveness of the narrator's actions. Wake up, go to the neighborhood bodega, watch Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, take a wild combination of drugs, fall asleep. As I did when reading Eileen, I felt like Moshfegh could have tightened up the story.
The story takes place from mid-2000 until September 11, 2001. What's the significance of that?
Moshfegh very effectively conveys the narrator's emotional attachments, which the narrator denies having. Her relationships with her (dead) parents and her friend Reva are touching even through the haze of her cynicism and depression. The book maintains an ironic "control of distance" between the narrator's point of view and the reader's, similar to what Jane Austen does in Emma (as famously described by the critic Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction).
However, I did sometimes grow tired of the repetitiveness of the narrator's actions. Wake up, go to the neighborhood bodega, watch Whoopi Goldberg movies on VHS, take a wild combination of drugs, fall asleep. As I did when reading Eileen, I felt like Moshfegh could have tightened up the story.
The story takes place from mid-2000 until September 11, 2001. What's the significance of that?
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